By My Side
Every year around this time, someone inevitably posts a photograph of their forehead dusted with ash, as if they’ve just survived a minor chimney collapse. This is how Lent begins; with a smudge and a reminder that you are, at best, compost in progress.
Lent, for those who slept through catechism, is the forty-day stretch between Ash Wednesday and Holy Saturday; a season of fasting, prayer, repentance, and charitable giving observed by Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, Lutherans, and anyone else willing to spend six weeks examining their own bad habits. The number forty mirrors Jesus’s forty days in the desert; hungry, tempted, and presumably wondering why no one packed snacks. Traditionally you give up meat on Fridays and perhaps chocolate or rum or the particular vice that keeps you interesting at dinner parties. Some people add something noble instead; daily prayer, volunteering, a renewed interest in not being a menace. The tone is penitential. It is a season for admitting you are not the masterpiece you assumed yourself to be. Easter waits at the far end like a bright, slightly intimidating promise.
This year I began Lent by thinking about a song.
Not a hymn, which would have been tidier, but “By My Side” from Godspell; that earnest, paint-splattered musical in which the disciples look as if they’ve raided a thrift store run by very optimistic clowns.
The song arrives near the end, just before the arrest and crucifixion. Up until then the show feels buoyant; there are parables, slapstick, community theater with theological ambitions. Then suddenly the air changes. The game becomes real.
“Where are you going?
Where are you going?
Can you take me with you?”
On the surface, it is devotion. Underneath, it is attachment. The disciples have left everything to follow this man, and now he is speaking of leaving them. The melody is small; almost childlike. It is not hero music. It is the sound of someone trying not to cry in front of the person they love.
A friend of mine once called it “the last song before innocence breaks.” His name was David. He was sweet in a way that did not advertise itself; gentle without being fragile; kind in the steady, unremarkable manner of someone who does not keep score. He has been gone thirty years.
I was thinking of him this morning at Sunday service on this, the first Sunday of Lent when the song drifted back to me. That line; the last song before innocence breaks. He said it decades ago, and now I carry it the way one carries a wallet; without noticing until it is suddenly needed.
The disciples in the song are not theologians in that moment. They are people afraid. “Don’t go without me.” “Don’t outgrow me.” “Don’t leave me behind.” It is the universal refrain of anyone whose center is about to disappear.
Lent, I realized, is the church’s way of rehearsing that fear on purpose.
For forty days you practice letting go before it is forced upon you. You give up what comforts you; meat on Fridays, sugar, scrolling, the nightly drink that insists it is medicinal. Or you take on something that feels slightly inconvenient; daily prayer, actual charity, the discipline of sitting still with your own thoughts. You step, voluntarily, into a small desert.
The disciples in “By My Side” are unprepared. They still believe salvation stands in front of them, embodied, available for touch. They have not yet learned the harder lesson; that presence must become absence so faith can move inside the ribs.
That is Lent’s quiet project. To surface the difference between devotion and dependency. To ask, gently but firmly; what are you leaning on? The feeling of God’s nearness? The structure of ritual?
The presence of the person who translated the world for you?
David did that for me once. He explained so much. And the song, and in doing so explained something about loss. Now he is gone, and the interpretation outlives the interpreter. I have not carried it forward, but have carried him inward. I just wish inward felt more like across the table.
Grief at thirty years is not theatrical. It does not fling itself against the walls. It sits down beside you during a musical and clears its throat. It arrives on the first Sunday of Lent and says; you are still not as brave as you thought.
Which is precisely the point.
Lent builds toward Easter; toward resurrection, joy, the improbable announcement that death does not get the final word. But you cannot rush there. You have to pass through the song first. The moment of “stay with me.” The admission that you want comfort more than truth.
Somewhere in those forty days, if you are paying attention, the plea shifts. From “Stay by my side” to “Teach me to carry you within.” From innocence to something steadier.
Forty days. A small desert. A song before the breaking.
Then the stage lights go out.
TW
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Beautifully put.